Month: June 2012

SO, AFTER tomorrow we will see who is right: Aesop or Goebbels. Aesop wrote The Boy who Cried Wolf – the fable whose moral was that liars are not rewarded. If you try to trick people by crying wolf when there is not one, they will not believe you when you cry wolf and there really is one. Continue reading “Propaganda will continue despite no meltdown”

WE SEEM to have a two-stream commentary interpreting our two-speed economy. One expresses puzzlement that Australia’s comparatively stellar economic performance is yielding nothing but whingeing from the voters and undeserved poor marks for a good government. The other asserts the Government is bungling and if only it would move out of the way the private sector would bring prosperity to all. Continue reading “Two wrong commentary streams on Oz economy”

THERE is no god-given right for The Newcastle Herald, the Illawarra Mercury, or indeed The Canberra Times, to come out every day. Running a newspaper has to be a business, albeit a public-spirited one, not a charity. Continue reading “Newspapers’ painful transmogrification”

IF CANBERRA had a cohort of filthy rich, Treasurer Andrew Barr’s tax “reform” might make some sense. But it does not. Canberra’s top end in the income and wealth scale is nothing like that in other Australian cities – business people with serious wealth. Continue reading “Over-taxing the goose’s property”

ONLY two bitumen roads cross the 1862-kilometre border between Western Australia and its eastern neighbours – one close to the coast in the north and one close to the coast in the south. In between is seemingly endless desert. It could be one of the easiest borders in the world to secure, if it came to that. Continue reading “Miners are masterful propagandists”